JOHN WILKES BOOTH new that the President ABRAHAM & Mrs. MARY
(TOD) LINCOLN was to be at Ford's Theater on the evening of Friday
April 14, 1865. That afternoon the tired President said to a
friend: "It has been advertised that we will be there, and I
cannot disappoint the people, otherwise I would not go. I do not
want to go."

The President and Mrs. LINCOLN reached the theater about 9:00 P.M.
April 14, 1865. They were accompanied by a young officer and his fiancee.
The Presidential party was shown to a flag draped box, where Mr. LINCOLN
eased himself into an upholstered rocking chair to enjoy the play.
A half hour later, about 9:30 P.M. JOHN WILKES BOOTH arrived at
the Theater. Pres. LINCOLN'S unreliable guard had left his post, and
the entrance to the Presidential box was unguarded. JOHN WILKES BOOTH slipped
along a back corridor and hurried to the door of the box. He sighted
Mr. LINCOLN through a hole he had drilled in the door that morning.
He silently entered, aimed a six-inch brass derringer at the back
of Mr. LINCOLN'S head, and fired. After grappling with the young officer
for a moment or two, JOHN WILKES BOOTH jumped from the box. He landed
on the stage, breaking his leg as he fell. Quickly he rushed out through
the wings and escaped on a horse waiting in the alley.

Mr. LINCOLN was carried into a private house across the street from
the theater. Through out the night doctors did what they could to
save Mr. LINCOLN'S life, but at 7:22 A.M. the next morning, Saturday
April 15, 1865 President ABRAHAM LINCOLN died.

Some 11 days later, on Wedensday, 26 April 1865, JOHN WILKES BOOTH
was trapped and killed in the burning barn of Mr. GARRETT, in Bowling
Green, Virginia. [See The "Pursuit, Capture, Death & Burial" of JOHN WILKES BOOTH for
Continuation. Chapter 3 ..prs]

Although from the start BOOTH was known for certain to be the murderer,
in the wild turmoil of the crime's aftermath scores of suspected accomplices
were arrested and thrown into prison. When these were finally narrowed
down to the eight (8) prisoners - Seven Men and One Woman considered
guilty enough to try in court. Secretary STANTON invented an unusual
and spectacular torture for them. He ordered eight heavy canvas hoods
made, padded with 1 inch thick cotton, and only one small hole opening
for eating, no openings for eyes or ears. Secretary STANTON ordered
that the "Headbags" be worn by the 7 men "day and night" as a
preventive to conversation. Headbag Number 8 has been reported,
never used on Mrs. MARY E. (JENKINS) SURRATT. It is believed that
Secretary STANTON knew the furor on indignation that this would cause.
[REF: #5. pg186]

A ball of extra cotton padding was placed covering the eyes so that
there was painful pressure on the closed eyelids. No baths or washing
of any kind were allowed, and during the hot breathless weeks of the
trial the prisoners' faces became more swollen and bloated by the
day, and even the prison Doctor began to fear for the conspirators'
sanity inside those heavy hoods laced so tightly around their necks.
But Secretary STANTON would not let them be removed, nor the rigid
wrist irons, nor the anklets each of which was connected to an iron
ball weighing 75 pounds.
[REF: #5. pg186]

ARRESTED, RELEASED:
The winnowing process had been a slow one, for the Old Capital Prison
and its wooden annex, Carroll Prison, were bulging with Secretary
STANTON suspects.
[REF: #5. pg187]

SAMUEL COX; A stanch Confederate, whose slaves set the United States
Detective Bureau on BOOTH'S and HEROLD'S tracks, though it was not
known that they harbored the guilty pair for better part of a week,
near Fort Tobacco. [REF: #5. pg187]

THOMAS A. BROWN/JONES; A Confederate mail-runner, whose slaves set
the United States Detective Bureau on BOOTH'S and HEROLD'S tracks,
though it was not known that they harbored the guilty pair for better
part of a week, near Fort Tobacco, Maryland. [REF: #5. pg187]
He was released for lack of evidence, but many years later he admitted hiding BOOTH
in the thicket for six days and feeding him. [REF: #5. pg203]

JOHN T. FORD; The owner of the FORD theater, who had been in Richmond,
VA. on Friday, Apr. 14, 1865, was imprisoned for 40 days. The other
2 FORD Brothers who had been in Washington, D.C. were arrested and
jailed. [REF: #5. pg186]

JOHN M. LLOYD; the drunken Innkeeper of the SURRATT's INN in Prince
George's Co., MD. He rented the SURRATT'S Tavern in Dec. 1864, when
Mrs. MARY E. (JENKINS) SURRATT, moved 13 miles North to her Washington,
D.C. Boarding House. [REF: #5. pg186]

LOUIS J. WELCHMANN; a boarder of Mrs. MARY E. (JENKINS) SURRATT
Boarding House. Weeks before he had informed the War Department of
the Plot-to-Capture, but Secretary STANTON had paid it no heed.
[REF: #5. pg186]

By Friday, April 28, 1865 (15 days after the Assassination) the
authorities had eight people it had decided to prosecute for having
conspired to kill President LINCOLN. The new President JOHNSON signed
an executive order that a Military Commission of 9 Officers be named
to try the alleged assassins. President JOHNSON had acted after hearing
the opinion of the Attorney General JAMES SPEED that a military rather
than a Civil Trial was proper, as the head of the United States Army
and Navy had been killed at the a time when the country was still
partially at war, in the country's capital while it was strongly fortified
against invasion. The Officers were selected, 7 Generals and 2 Colonels,
with Major General DAVID HUNTER as the presiding member of the commission.
The Judge Advocate General JOSEPH HOLT and 2 Assistant Judge Advocates
would conduct the trial.

During the late hours of Saturday, April 29, 1865 STANTON ordered
the accused to move from the Gunboats to the building with its high
stone walls, (which 4 would never leave) the Old Penitentiary,
(Under a floor which already lay the body of BOOTH) Mrs. SURRATT,
heavily veiled, and the 7 men in their suffocating canvas hoods were
led through a passageway of soldiers and up the steps of the Old
Penitentiary out side of which the pleasure boats going to and from
Mount Vernon down the Potomac passed very near. The prisoners were
lodged in cells on the second and third floors. Had they been able
to stand on the Old Penitentiary's roof, with their hoods off, they
could have looked Northwest to the City of Washington D.C. across
a stretch of river, and seen clearly the Washington Monument stump,
the White House, the red, many-towered Smithsonian, and the Capitol
with the statue of Freedom on its dome. But there was no such excursion
planned as a trip to the roof for this group. The prisoners were placed
in cells separated from each other by an empty cell on each side.
(they would have to shout to hear each other) each prisoner was
guarded with 4 soldiers, each still wore the suffocating hood, the
stiff shackles, and steel anklets connected by chains to an 75 lbs.
iron ball for each foot, except for Mrs. SURRATT whose feet were
merely chained together. [REF: #5. pg193]

The Commission choose a courtroom which would be an easy walk from
the cells, a large, upper-story room which had been freshly white-washed.
Even with its four closely barred windows, it was breathless in there
on hot days and there were plenty of them as the Trial continued on
into the burning Washington D.C. summer. [REF: #5. pg193]

The trial of the 8 alleged assassins began on Tuesday, May 09, 1865
(26 days after the Assassination) and ground on through long days
of testimony heard from more than 400 witnesses, through June 30,
1865. In all that time not one of the prisoners was ever allowed to
take the stand and say a word for their defense. Questions by the
court and answers by witnesses trying to have the 7 men and Mrs.
MARY (JENKINS) SURRATT, and those hoping to free them, were published
daily word for word in the newspapers and the whole nation read each
chapter of the to- be-continued mystery story - impatiently awaiting
each new session's developments. To many it seemed as though the government
was only slightly and rather grumpily interested in the 8 unimportant
wretches it had in its grasp and was really expending all its might
in trying a group of men who were still annoyingly free - a list of
names that held great fascination for they belonged to the high officials
of the hated Confederacy. Of course the 8 in the courtroom would
be punished, but the important thing was to prove the guilt of JEFFERSON
DAVIS and the group of top leaders who had been operating from the
safety of Canada - where BOOTH and JOHN H. SURRATT, Jr. were known
to have journeyed, and they just must all be found implicated in the
plot together, somehow.

The military court was not slow in producing a bomb-shell. It produced
two printers who had set the type for a 5-day repeat notice in the
Selma, Alabama, Dispatch starting on Dec. 01, 1864, announcing that
for 1 Million dollars the placer of the notice would agree to kill
ABRAHAM LINCOLN, WILLIAM H. SEWARD, and ANDREW JOHNSON by the 1st
of March -- "That will give us peace and satisfy the world that cruel
tyrants cannot live in a 'land of liberty'!' -- The anonymous
speaker would himself donate, as a starter, 1,000 dollars toward the
patriotic purpose of slaughtering the three villains, and the post
office box number was given which would await contributions. It was
never proven that JEFFERSON DAVIS or any other to Confederates,
had the slightest connection with the attention-grabbing Selma, Alabama,
offer, even though Secretary STANTON, the over-all director of the
trial, wanted desperately to discover evidence that would implicate
the Confederate high powers in the assassination. Even though Secretary
STANTON was happily positive he already had the goods on them in their
efforts to start epidemics throughout the country by the introduction
of deadly germs into populated areas; in their plans for setting multiple
fires in the larger northern cites; for poisoning water supplies;
blowing up the Union shipping; deliberately starving to death thousands
of Northern prisoners -- in short, "the disorganization of the North
by infernal plots."

Lacking the physical presence of its most wanted criminals, the Military
Commission had to get to work anyway and make do with what it had,
so on Tuesday, May 9th. 1865, its first day of convening, it graciously
adjourned to allow its 8 prisoners 24 hours to procure counsel to
defend them. As all the prisoners had been imprisoned incommunicado
for a good part of 3 weeks, they had not been able to do much about
this problem and it was extraordinary that as able a group of defenders
were so quickly assembled and agreed to do their best, free of charge.

The most distinguished member of the Defense was REVERDY JOHNSON,
who had been Attorney General of the United States and Senator from
Maryland, who had never met Mrs. SURRATT, and now offered to be
her lawyer, and he brought with him the Junior lawyers of his practice,
FREDERICK AIKEN and JOHN CLAMPIT.

The extremely able and high-minded lawyer THOMAS S. EWING, Jr. brother-in-law
of General SHERMAN, who had just returned from distinguished service
in the war took on both Dr. SAMUEL A. MUDD and EDWARD SPANGLER, though
being a part of this unpopular Defense was the last thing he felt
like doing just then.

FREDERICK STONE agreed to do his best for DAVID HEROLD and WALTER
S. COX held the futures of SAMUEL B. ARNOLD and MICHAEL O'LAUGHLIN
in his care, and successful Attorney Colonel WILLIAM E. DOSTER, accepted
a difficult client of GEORGE T. ATZERODT. Then, because LEWIS T. POWELL/PAINE
was entirely friendless and without a member of his family anywhere
nearby Colonel DOSTER accepted him "temporarily" but had to keep
him permanently as no offer to help the outstanding villain among
the 8 ever turned up. Colonel DOSTER was in no way deceived as to
the hopelessness of his task -- as he himself put it --
"this was a contest in which a few lawyers were on one side, and
the whole United States on the other, a case in which, of course,
the verdict was known beforehand."

Each day official members of the court and witnesses were brought
from the center of Washington D.C by ambulances. The witnesses waited
in small anteroom until they were called one by one to stand at a
railed platform in the center of the room, facing the court to answer
questions. All those who came from the outside world walked into the
Penitentiary and up what seemed endless flights of twisting stairs
squeezing past soldiers on guard every few feet, then through narrow
passageways where they were seated in time to view the slowmarch of
"the eight miserable wretches" to their appointed seats on the raised
dock. The prisoners' hoods were always removed for the daily walk
into the courtroom from their cells, and they took their places with
a soldier between each one. Mrs. SURRATT, all in black and with
a heavy veil over her head and face, sat at the far left end as the
Military Commission faced the prisoners, rather chastely, a few feet
removed from the rest. Mrs. SURRATT had been given an armchair,
all the other prisoners were in straight wooden chairs. As the prisoners
rose each noon to file out of the courtroom for the luncheon recess,
there was suddenly filling the room the harsh clank and scraping of
irons, the higher ringing -- almost a tinkle in comparison with the
heavy chains -- of Mrs. SURRATT's smaller links under her skirts. Soldiers
walked beside the men carry the 75 lbs. cannon balls which were fasten
to their anklets and which they would barely have been able to pull
after them across the straw matting.

There was a table in the large room for stenographers, a long one
for the Military Commission, one for the press and a small one for
the exhibits like BOOTH's riding boot which Dr. SAMUEL A. MUDD had
to split to get it off his swollen leg; his spur; POWELL/PAINE's knife;
his slouch hat, and coat; SPANGLER's precious length of rope for crabbing;
the candle, and compass that helped BOOTH and HEROLD crossed the Potomac.
However, criminally lacking was BOOTH's Diary which set forth in his
Friday, April 14, 1865 entry that "he had only on that very day changed
his plans from kidnaping to Murder." The presence of that Diary,
which Secretary STANTON would keep secret for two years, would certainly
have saved Mrs. SURRATT's life, as she was sentenced to hang on
having "Conspired to Murder".

Secretary STANTON had seen to it that the prosecution would win, and
one of the aids he enlisted to help him was General HENRY L. BURNETT
-- appointed for the trial to be Assistant Judge Advocate to JOSEPH
HOLT. General BURNETT said Secretary STANTON worked on assembling
the evidence that would defeat the prisoners all day every day, and
most nights General BURNETT worked with him until sunrise. When the
exhausted General BURNETT left around 3:00 o'clock in the morning
Secretary STANTON was still bent over his desk at the War Department.

To get this head start on the prisoners Secretary STANTON used all
of the United States Beau of Detectives and ordered trains of all
the railroads to carry people here and there at his bidding. He sent
endless peremptory telegrams and found time as well to keep throwing
into prison people about whom their neighbors only "felt there was
something funny." Then too, Secretary STANTON dreamed up a wonderful
rule for the prosecutors -- the Military Commission could impose any
restriction it saw fit -- and that was that when the prisoners got
their defending lawyers, they could never see them in their cells
to talk over what in their eyes they had done or not done and what
should be said now. Instead they could only communicate with their
Attorneys in full sight of the crowded Courtroom, separated by a railing
and with a soldier on each side listening. It was absolutely hopeless.
In sight of the Military Commission and the Press and the spellbound
daily visitors Colonel DOSTER's bewildering client POWELL/PAINE just
leaned his head against the wall day after day and said nothing --
Colonel DOSTER knew almost nothing about him. The other prisoners
leaned forward and whispered their self- justifications and their
hopes, pathetically.

LEWIS POWELL/PAINE and Mrs. SURRATT were the two immensely colorful
members of the prisoners in the docket -- on whom the country's interest
was centered with insatiable curiosity. Next in the strange opposite-of-a-popularity
contest ranked Dr. SAMUEL A. MUDD and young DAVID HEROLD. Then GEORGE
ATZERODT and EDWARD SPANGLER, the theater handyman. And at the bottom
of the eight names, so colorless and boring that people could hardly
remember who they were or why they were there, were BOOTH's early
friends, SAMUEL ARNOLD and MICHAEL O'LAUGHLIN.

By the time the trial began on Friday, May 12th. 1865, Secretary STANTON
knew exactly what witnesses should testify and they were all people
who furthered the "Conspiracy" picture. Often they were dismissed
and had gone home before the Defense could cross-examine them. Many
were from the U.S. Beau of Detectives and seemed to have been coached
carefully on what to say. The list of perfectly available witness
who could have illuminated the President LINCOLN's murder, and who
were not called, seemed to go unnoticed in the daily publicizing
of the memories and theories of Secretary STANTON's hand-selected
list. No one seemed to notice a pattern in the tenor of what was said
and when the defending Lawyers protested, they were gruffly overruled
by Advocate General HOLT.

"Peanuts" BURROUGHS said that after SPANAGLER had helped HARRY CLAY
FORD decorate the theater box he -- "dammed the President and GRANT
and said being dammed was what they deserved for getting so many men
killed."

One of the actors in the play Our American Cousin, E.A. EMERSON,
said that BOOTH had wacked him over the shoulder with a cane breaking
it in four pieces and saying of LINCOLN -- "Did you hear what that
old scroundrel did the other day, he went to DAVIS' home in Richmond
and threw his long leggs over the arm of a chair and squirted tobacco
juice all over the place. Someone ought to kill him."

A Richmond, VA. blind man, SAMUEL P. JONES, testified -- "he had
heard a man offer $10,000 for the killing of President Lincoln."

The little old colored women who lived in the alley behind Ford's
Theater testified that BOOTHS horse had been out in the alley waiting
for an hour and a half, stamping and stamping on the cobblestones,
and she thought, "Whatever is the matter with that horse?"

The stableman at 13th. and E streets, describing HEROLD coming for
his horse, said he had black eyebrows and "kind of a smile on his
face" and made it sound incriminating. On that day that HEROLD's
smile was described, May 18, young TAD LINCOLN was in the courtroom
in the spectators section and heard Judge OLIN described the red damask
chair in which his father was killed as being spattered with drops
of blood.

An actor from New York named SAMUEL KNAPP CHESTER, testified that
he had rebuffed BOOTH in horror when asked to join the kidnaping
conspiracy. BOOTH, he said, had made several trips North to New York
to pled with him, offering him $3,000 just to hold the back door of
Ford's Theater open while the President was being hustled out to a
waiting carriage. CHESTER had refused, and BOOTH angrily told him
--"he would ruin him and that he felt like doing worse. He said that
the actor JOHN MATTHEWS in Washington, D.C. had refused to join him,
he (BOOTH) had felt very much like "sacrificing" him" -- BOOTH's
refined word for killing. November 1864 was the date of the first
visit to enlist CHESTER, and BOOTH came back to New York after LINCOLN's
March 4th. second inauguration. CHESTER faced his follow actor BOOTH,
smiling across the table where they were having a drink and BOOTH
asked him if he had changed his mind about coming to Washington D.C.
and cursed him when he had not. BOOTH said --"there were 50 to 100
people enlisted now and not a chance of anything going wrong, there
were plenty of money and plenty of aid waiting "on the other side."
The plan was still a harmless "kidnaping -- no one would be hurt
and the war would be over, prisoners freed and home again." CHESTER
had put on his most dejected expression and ask BOOTH "to think of
his (LINCOLN) poor wife and mother", and that was the last he saw
of BOOTH.

As the carefully government-carpentered testimony began to pile up
on the prisoners, along with it came some interesting, often carefully
detailed, sometimes impassioned, refutations. The prosecution had
suggested that the silly boy HEROLD with his subnormal smile had been
up to no good during the week of February 13th., and his sister EMMA
HEROLD hotly contested this. She remembered that DAVY was home on
the 13th. because he sent her a Valentine and was there the next day
when it arrived in the mail, and that he was still there on Sunday
the 19th. because he met her on the stairs and tried to take a pitcher
of water she was carrying from her and it spilled all over.

Just as fascinating was the refutation that Dr. SAMUEL A. MUDD had
been in Washington D.C. for LINCOLN's second inauguration. One MARCAUS
P. NORTON claimed that on the 3rd of the month Dr. MUDD had rushed
into his room at the National Hotel, said he must see JOHN WILKES
BOOTH immediately and was directed to BOOTH's room. In her brother's
defense Miss MARY MUDD said that she knew positively that the Doctor
was home at his farm on that day, as he had come to treat her for
an eruption on her face and she feared was smallpox, and that he hurried
to her bedroom direct from stripping tobacco all day long. He washed
the tobacco gum from his hands before he examined her, right there
in her room. Miss MARY MUDD also, unfortunately for her brother,
described the hat her brother usually wore as a "drab slouch hat"
which fitted perfectly the hat he was supposed to have been wearing
in Washington, D.C. on 3rd of the month.

During the trial Dr. MUDD had succeeded in whispering, to his lawyer
his version of BOOTH's visit to him on the night he set the actor's
leg, and the Military Commission must have been pleased with its evasiveness
and obvious deviation from the facts. It went like this" "When BOOTH
and Herold knocked on his door a 4:00 o'clock on the morning of Saturday,
the 15th of April, 1865 having arrived on horseback, the doctor did
not recognize BOOTH as the man whom he had dickered some months before
on the price for which he would sell him his far,. BOOTH said his
name was TYLOR and HAROLD said his was TYSON, and BOOTH was wearing
false whiskers -- which of course Dr. MUDD thought were real -- and
had the lower part of his face muffled in a shawl. Dr. MUDD cut off
BOOTH's boot, set the fractured leg in a cardboard splint, and his
servant made a crutch. BOOTH was put in a bed upstairs where he lay
till 4:00 o'clock the next afternoon when Mrs. MUDD went up to see
him. She brought a tray holding cake, two oranges, and wine -- BOOTH
asked for brandy instead of Wine, but there was none. He complained
"My back hurts me dreadfully," and he kept his face turned to the
wall. Dr. MUDD at that moment was in Bryanton visiting some patients
and when he came back TYLER and TYSON had left on their horses,
and Mrs. MUDD said that TYLER came down the stairs his whiskers
had become detached and almost fell off. Mrs. MUDD wondered is the
askew whiskers weren't suspicious but out of fear of being alone,
she persuaded the Doctor not to go back to Bryantown to report it.
[REF: #5. pg200

During the hours when the prisoner POWELL/PAINE was hooded and back
in his cell, ECKERT was there with him, also busily working on the
Dr. MUDD story. POWELL/PAINE told him of a meeting of the Conspirators
in a room that for once was NOT in Mrs. SURRATT's Boarding House
and ECKERT went and found the room -- poked around in a grate in a
fireplace there and discovered scraps of paper on which were written
details of a "kidnaping" and also, plainly, the name of MUDD.
[REF: #5. pg200

About the time POWELL/PAINE's lawyer DOSTER decided that the only
hope of saving his troublesome client was to have him declared insane
and hope the Military Commission would not be willing to hang a crazy
man. He got hold of Dr. NICHOLS, superintendent of the huge Government
Insane Asylum up on the hill, plainly seen from the Old Penitentiary
-- just across the Anacostia, and based his suspicions of POWELL/PAINE's
mental state to Dr. NICHOLS on the facts of POWELL/PAINE had stayed
up in a treetop for three days, that he had laughed in Court while
trying on his hat, and that his bowels were completely deranged and
only worked, according to the guard in his cell, once in every five
days, and that POWELL/PAIN had cried "I am mad! I am Mad!" as he
ran down the stairs in Secretary STANTON's house after attacking Major
AUGUSTS SEWARD. The authority on insanity gave the matter full attention
and in the end said that his starving up in a tree was very close
to insanity -- he did not feel strongly one way or another about the
paralysis of POWELL/PAINE's intestines -- but he did point out that
a person who is really mad does not ever tell people "I am mad"
and that POWELL/PAINE was positively pretending when he said it.
[REF: #5. pg200]

Mrs. SURRATT, evidence was mounting against her even though, to
her lawyer and attending Priests in her cell, she steadfastly protested
ignorance of any knowledge of the plot which had been hatched in her
Boarding House. The Officers who had arrested her said that in her
living room was a framed colored picture of three young women representing
"Spring, Summer and Autumn" and behind this had been discovered
a photograph of JOHN WILKES BOOTH. To add to this, on top of her
dresser were two bullet molds. W. M. WANNERSKERCH of the arresting
party was ask to identify Mrs. SURRATT as the women he had taken
into custody and he replied that he could not see her face. Then,
the Court Stenographers reported, "slowly, coolly, Mrs. SURRATT
lifted her veil, looked steadily at him and slowly, coolly lowered
the veil again." Mrs. SURRATT had to be remove from the courtroom
several times because of faintness but in moments like this there
was an admiration for her among the visitors -- they thought her a
women of "great nerve." [REF: #5. pg201]

It was really the two witnesses LOUIS J. WEICHMANN and JOHN M.
LLOYD the keeper of her Surrattville, MD. Tavern who had clinched
Mrs. SURRATT's conviction, as the Government meant they should,
and for which favor the Government offered them both Immunity and
switched them from the ranks of Witnesses who were to be Prosecuted
to the safety of State's evidence. [REF: #5. pg201]

LOUIS J. WEICHMANN had been an old school friend of Mrs. SURRATT's
son JOHN H. SURRATT, Jr. when he came to her Boarding House on "H"
Street in Washington, D.C. Mrs. SURRATT would sit up for him when
he was out late and encouraged him in the State Department job in
the Prisoners' Commissary Department. There was evidence after the
trial and her hanging that LOUIS J. WEICHMANN had been threatened
into signing a statement, written out for him, to save his own skin,
the Secretary STANTON had frightened him to death by suggesting he
was as guilty as the rest in the house and would have to pay the penalty
of death. WEICHMANN did summoned enough courage to say to the Judge
Advocate during the trial that he (STANTON) had confused and frightened
him so much the day before that he did not know what he was saying.
[REF: #5. pg201]

But then came the day when his course was clear -- LOUIS J. WEICHMANN
was released from Prison and was sent on missions for the Government,
even as far away as Canada. And WEICHMANN was completely glib when
he told how on the afternoon of the 14th April 1865, BOOTH had come
to see Mrs. SURRATT and asked her to drive to the Surrattville
Tavern and tell the innkeeper LLOYD to have the shooting irons and
whiskey ready that very night for they would be called for. Mrs.
SURRATT repeatedly told her lawyers that she had gone to see LLOYD
only on business concerning the Tavern, and that was all they had
talked about -- but WEICHMANN insisted all he said was true, and he
looked so open and honest and so very sorry to have to say the words,
that he was believable. [REF: #5. pg201]

As for JOHN M. LLOYD, a former Washington D.C. policeman 2. who
gave the two murderers BOOTH & HEROLD their carbines and whisky, he
admitted at the trial, that during his meeting with Mrs. SURRATT
earlier in the afternoon of April 14th he had been so drunk and could
not remember what they had talked about, admitting that by midnight
when the two men arrived on horseback he was "right smart on liquor"
and though he felt like lying down on the sofa he could not because
lying down made him feel sick and dizzy. In spite of the fact that
Secretary STANTON had announced that any person found to have harbored
or abetted the conspirators in their escape would pay the death penalty,
still LLOYD, when he managed to sort out his muddled memories and
remember what the Government suggested to him that he had heard, was
able to testify that Mrs. SURRATT had asked him to have field glasses
and carbines which he had hidden under the rafter ready for the two
men who would call for them that night. [REF: #5. pg202]

Just as the War Department decided what certain people would testify
and bribed them with a promise of immunity, it also decided just who
would testify, and there were some strange omissions, and some very
important faces never showed up in the courtroom.

There was, of course the policeman JOHN PARKER who had been supposed
to guard LINCOLN's box door and had gone down into the front row of
the dress circle to enjoy the play. He was never called upon to testify
at all, why he left his post? [REF: #5. pg202]

Two men who had plenty to say did not testify because they successfully
held their tongues and their stories were undiscovered during the
trial. 1st was JOHN MATTHEWS, actor friend of BOOTH's waited two years
to speak out. MATTHEWS on the afternoon before the assassination met
with BOOTH, who handed his letter explaining what he was about to
do and why. BOOTH wanted MATTHEWS to mail it to the editor of the
Washington Daily Intelligence the following morning. After the assassination,
with the knowledge that BOOTH was the murderer, MATTHEWS ran to his
boarding house, opened and memorized the letter, and then burned it.
[REF: #5. pg203]

2nd was THOMAS J. JONES, a Confederate sympathizer, who had something
worse to hide, did not speak out for over 20 years, until 188[REF: #5. He
was first arrested, but was released for lack of evidence. Later
he admitted hiding BOOTH and HEROLD in the thicket south of Port Tobacco,
near the Potomac River, for six days and feeding them. [REF: #5. pg203]

Finally as June came to an end, the trial was completed. Out of the
endless sheafs of testimony, the obvious evidence, the charges, denials,
insinuations, the lies, the truth, the half- lies, the half-truths,
the loaded statements, the Government inspired prejudice, out of the
heat of the courtroom, the sight of the involuntarily silent accused
persons and the valiant appeals of their lawyers, out of the still
fresh memory of the murder of President LINCOLN, out of War's end
and the temper of the country split, brother against brother, and
finally out of the souls of nine Military men, had to come a decision.
[REF: #5. pg203]